Download A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son by Geoffrey C. Ward PDF

Ferdinand Ward was once the best swindler of the Gilded Age. via his unapologetic villainy, he bankrupted Ulysses S. supply and ran roughshod over the whole global of finance. Now, his compelling, behind-the-scenes tale is told—told through his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward.
Ward was once the Bernie Madoff of his day, a intended genius at making tremendous cash speedy on Wall highway who grew to become out to were working a massive pyramid scheme—one that finally collapsed in a single of the best monetary scandals in American background. The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets and techniques of his personal to maintain, Ward got here to long island at twenty-one and in under a decade, armed with allure, strength, and a complete loss of moral sense, made himself the enterprise companion of the previous president of the U.S. and was once greatly hailed because the “Young Napoleon of Finance.” honestly, he became out to be an entire fraud, his complete existence marked via dishonesty, cowardice, and contempt for whatever yet his personal interests.
Drawing from hundreds of thousands of relatives files by no means sooner than tested, Geoffrey C. Ward lines his great-grandfather’s fast upward push to riches and repute and his much more dizzying fall from grace. There are mistresses and mansions alongside the best way; quick horses and crooked bankers and corrupt ny officers; court confrontations and 6 years in Sing Sing; and Ferdinand’s determined scheme to kidnap his personal son to get his palms at the property his overdue spouse had left the boy. here's a nice tale a few vintage American con artist, informed with boundless appeal and dry wit by means of one in all our most interesting historians.

In humans of Paradox, Terryl Givens lines the increase and improvement of Mormon tradition from the times of Joseph Smith in upstate long island, via Brigham Young's founding of the Territory of Deseret at the seashores of significant Salt Lake, to the unfold of the Latter-Day Saints worldwide.
during the final century and a part, Givens notes, special traditions have emerged one of the Latter-Day Saints, formed by means of dynamic tensions--or paradoxes--that provide Mormon cultural expression a lot of its energy. here's a faith formed by means of a inflexible authoritarian hierarchy and radical individualism; by way of prophetic simple task and a party of studying and highbrow research; via life in exile and a craving for integration and recognition through the bigger global. Givens divides Mormon historical past into classes, separated via the renunciation of polygamy in 1890. In each one, he explores the lifetime of the brain, the emphasis on schooling, the significance of structure and concrete making plans (so obvious in Salt Lake urban and Mormon temples round the world), and Mormon accomplishments in song and dance, theater, movie, literature, and the visible arts. He situates such cultural practices within the context of the society of the bigger kingdom and, in additional contemporary years, the realm. this present day, he observes, merely fourteen percentage of Mormon believers reside within the usa.
Mormonism hasn't ever been extra well known in public lifestyles. yet there's a wealthy internal lifestyles underneath the general public floor, one deftly captured during this sympathetic, nuanced account by means of a number one authority on Mormon heritage and proposal.

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren lower back to his local Todd nation, Kentucky, to wait ceremonies in honor of one other local son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose usa citizenship had simply been restored, 90 years after his dying, by means of a distinct act of Congress. From that nostalgic trip grew this reflective essay at the tragic occupation of Jefferson Davis — "not a latest guy in any experience of the observe yet a conservative referred to as to control what was once, in a single feel, a revolution. "

Jefferson Davis will get His Citizenship again can be a meditation through considered one of our most dear males of letters at the ironies of yankee heritage and the paradoxes of the fashionable South.

From his early life in rural Illinois to moviemaking days in Hollywood and directly to a occupation in politics that took him the entire method to the Oval workplace, Ronald Reagan saved an abiding religion in the US and in what our kingdom stood for. The oldest president ever, he survived a near-fatal assassination try out and lived to be 93.

Who used to be Ronald Reagan? covers his lifestyles and occasions in a balanced, enjoyable approach for kids. greater than a hundred black-and-white illustrations fill out the portrait of our 40th president.

Set on the most sensible of the Cajon go within the excessive desolate tract of Southern California, Hesperia used to be outfitted at the spirit and power of personality of yank frontiersmen. From the time of the 1st documented tourists in the course of the quarter within the past due 1700s and carrying on with into the 1900s, the quarter has been a spot of innovation and sumptuous feats, the place males have traveled via to new lands for a brand new commence, remarkable it wealthy or making that enormous company deal in a brand new frontier.

Extra info for A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States

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15 Fortescue, Correspondence of George III, ill, nr. 1706. 16 SP84/547, Yorke to Suffolk, 5 Sept. 1775. Printed in Kapp, Soldatenhandel, p. 243, but in such a manner as to give the false impression that Yorke had actually sounded out these princes. See also SP84/555, Suffolk to Yorke, 4 Mar. 1777, listing those princes actually approahced. Although two contemporary travel accounts state that Faucitt made an offer to Hessen-Darmstadt and was refused, there is nothing to support this in the official 11 correspondence in SP81/181-96.

Nef's theme is that involvement in war is detrimental to a nation's economic and cultural development. 59 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 1516. 32 The Hessians go to America was better to give English money than English lives, that the subsidy policy was cheaper because industry and trade would still flourish and soon draw back the money paid abroad. 61 Friedrich II of HessenKassel was an educated and cultured man, the typical small scale enlightened despot: an active reformer, reorganizing the administration of his state and its penal code, abolishing the death penalty for various crimes and the use of torture.